Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on May 15, 2017

Chris McKenna Times Herald-Record @ChrisMcKenna845

SOUTH BLOOMING GROVE It didn't take Jeff and Elizabeth Baum long to find a buyer for their house once they decided it was time to leave Worley Heights.

One by one, a cascade of neighbors already had made the same decision, selling their homes to eager Hasidic couples and investors from nearby Kiryas Joel or Brooklyn in the midst of a real-estate frenzy. Interest was so feverish that about 25 prospective buyers streamed through the Baums' four-bedroom bi-level once they put it on the market. And in just four days, they had accepted an offer for the house they had lived in for 28 years.

They have since moved to Cornwall-on-Hudson, about 13 miles away."I would have loved to have stayed there," said Jeff Baum, a retired New York City police officer."This upset our plans in life. I'm a senior citizen. I wanted to age in place, but you can't do that in Blooming Grove at this time."

A steady turnover began in the Village of South Blooming Grove early last year. Since the home-sale closings began to accumulate in March of 2016, at least 170 homes 15 percent of the village's entire housing stock have changed hands, judging from the sale records that buyers so far have filed with the Orange County Clerk's Office. Virtually all of the buyers were from Kiryas Joel, Brooklyn or other largely Hasidic and Orthodox communities such as Monsey and Lakewood, N.J.

The same phenomenon has occurred, to a lesser degree, in other neighborhoods in Monroe and Woodbury, as more couples from the fast-growing Hasidic community look outside the congested and largely built-up confines of Kiryas Joel for housing, especially those seeking a more suburban lifestyle in which to raise their families. The demand for homes never lets up. And with efforts to expand Kiryas Joel tied up in litigation, and plans for new subdivisions in Monroe frozen for the past year by a building moratorium, buyers have focused largely on existing homes in the towns surrounding Kiryas Joel.

South Blooming Grove is a notable example both because of the high volume of homes that have been sold and the potential for a future political shift. Large in size and low in population, the village has about 3,200 people living in five square miles, an area roughly five times the size of Kiryas Joel which has at least 23,000 residents and pending plans for hundreds of additional homes. Though political control may be the last thing that families buying homes in South Blooming Grove have in mind, the steady influx of Hasidim suggests the newcomers eventually will gain enough voting clout to decide the outcome of elections for mayor and village trustees.

The new frontier

Almost a decade before the turnover began, Yoel and Zipora Wagschal moved to South Blooming Grove from Kiryas Joel for some of the same reasons the new arrivals have come.

Yoel Wagschal, a certified public accountant who teaches accounting at Touro College, said by email that he grew up in Monsey "in a private house with a private property" and wanted to raise his kids the same way."I ended moving to KJ after I got married," he wrote. "It was very frustrating because I could not find a private house, yet moving far away wasnt an option since my children are well established with friends and schools."

And so at the end of 2006, the Wagschals bought a house on Kingsville Drive, a cul-de-sac with the closest homes to Kiryas Joel.

Today, they are the pioneers for South Blooming Grove's growing Hasidic population. Though many homes have been left unoccupied since being sold,enough Hasidim have moved into the village that two houses serve as makeshift synagogues, and school buses navigate the winding streets each day to collect children who attend yeshivas in and around Kiryas Joel.

Four young Hasidic mothers, standing on a corner on Virginia Avenue and chatting after the school buses had come through one recent morning, told a Times Herald-Record reporter that they all had moved to the neighborhood from Kiryas Joel in the past year to live in a more suburban environment. They said their new houses cost less than condominiums of comparable size in Kiryas Joel, and yet also had nice-sized yards and all the neighborhood tranquility that has become scarce in Kiryas Joel's maze of condominium buildings.

It was quiet. Above all, they liked the quiet.

None of the women wanted to be identified in a newspaper article, for fear of breaching their community's strict modesty standards. They agreed that their neighbors all have been kind and welcoming, and that the benefits of moving out of Kiryas Joel outweighed the drawbacks. Yes, property taxes are higher, but the lower housing prices even things out. True, there are no kosher-food stores or any stores, for that matter in the neighborhood, a potential problem for Satmar Hasidic women, since they don't drive. But the mothers on Virginia shrugged at that inconvenience, saying they share taxis or can be driven to Kiryas Joel to shop.

Many South Blooming Grove homes that have changed hands in the past year were purchased by investors who bought multiple properties. Property records show, for example, that Mayer Gross of Brooklyn bought four houses, Kiryas Joel residents Joel Rosenfeld and Aron Jacobowitz each picked up five, and Kiryas Joel's Tovia Jacobowitz scooped up seven, at a total price of $1.9 million.

The most prolific buyer so far is Arthur Meisels, a Brooklyn resident who has bought at least eight homes. He said in an interview that he made those purchases because the prices were low, and that demand for homes in the neighborhood is so high because it offers the closest available housing opportunities for Kiryas Joel families. The court fight over Kiryas Joel's efforts to annex land and the Monroe building moratorium have limited those prospects, he argued.

Matthew DeRosa lives in South Blooming Grove in the house his grandfather built in 1967, and says he loves his hometown. After the surge in home sales began about a year ago, DeRosa started a "United South Blooming Grove" Facebook page to promote community involvement. Among longtime residents like himself who plan to stay, he said there is concern that so many homes bought by investors are being rented out to tenants who might be less invested in South Blooming Grove than homeowners.

"Our biggest fear is having a population of people who don't care about the community," he said.

The neighborhood flux has brought longtime residents closer together, DeRosa said. But it also has spurred a desire to get to know the newcomers, to overcome distrust between the Hasidim and their neighbors. He pointed out that Wagschal made a friendly overture during the winter by posting on the community's Facebook page his offer to plow driveways for free.

"We would love to find a way to get to know the Hasidim," DeRosa said.

New kids in town

One mystery for South Blooming Grove's longtime residents is why many homes have sat empty or been rented to non-Hasidic tenants after being sold, despite the buyers' intense interest and the Hasidic community's housing needs. The Baums' house, the one that 25 people looked at to buy, had been vacant for seven months when Jeff Baum was interviewed in late March.Village records indicate about 50 houses that were sold in the past year used no water in the first three months of this year, meaning they had nobody living in them and probably were not even being renovated.

Mayor Rob Jeroloman said some homes that changed hands appeared to be occupied only on weekends or holidays. Some have been empty as long as a year, which became a problem a few times last winter when water pipes froze and burst inside houses with no one there to shut off the water. One vacant house had to be gutted after more than 100,000 gallons of water gushed through it, Jeroloman said.

Nonetheless, other problems that residents worried about when the turnover began a littlemorethana year ago have proven unfounded, Jeroloman said. No buyers have declared their houses to be synagogues or religious schools and requested property-tax exemptions. There has been no increase in water or sewer usage because of large families moving in. And the initial deluge of unsolicited purchase offers that agitated South Blooming Grove's residents has now subsided, giving way to more traditional and unhurried transactions in which the sellers put their homes on the market and plant "for sale" signs on their lawns.

Yet the sales pace only seems to have quickened. At least 47 homes changed hands in just the first three months of this year. Including homes that sold before March of 2016,Hasidic families and investors now own more than 1 in 6 of South Blooming Grove's 1,125 houses and condominiums, according to county property records, and they will own a majority in less than three years if the turnover continues at its recent pace.

The number of households occupied by Hasidic families remains relatively modest. Washingtonville School District currently buses 116 children from 42 South Blooming Grove homes to Kiryas Joel's United Talmudical Academy and two other yeshiva systems serving the Hasidic community. The district so far has requests to bus a total of 144 students from 55 households to those yeshivas for the school year that starts this fall.

That gradual population shift means Hasidic voters eventually will have the clout to elect the Village Board, a situation similar to what has happened in the tiny Sullivan County Village of Bloomingburg after Hasidic families moved in. And one implication of a future shift in political power, whenever that day comes, is a potential change in how much housing development South Blooming Grove will allow on its large stretches of vacant land.A governing board elected by Hasidic voters might choose to adopt less restrictive zoning to accommodate more population growth. That would mark an ironic turn in the village's history, given that it was created in 2006 to retain zoning control amid jitters that Kiryas Joel would expand or incorporate a new Hasidic village.

There is plenty of land to develop.Yet limited groundwater could prove a formidable obstacle to more intensive development of South Blooming Grove. The owners of the former Lake Anne Country Club a sprawling, 851-acre expanse on the east side of the village have tried to build homes there for a decade and have pending plans for a 600-unit development called Clovewood, which they say would cater to the Hasidic community. They have drilled numerous wells at the site in search of sufficient groundwater, thus far without success. Adjacent to Lake Anne are two undeveloped tracts totaling 170 acres, both owned by the same real-estate company in Brooklyn.

Jeroloman points out that even with the current population, several municipal wells have run dry in recent years, and others have had to be extended deeper below ground to supply enough water.

"The aquifer here is at a critical stage, and has been," he said."We are just making the daily demand for the people that are in our water district now."

In theory, the densely populated community to the south could some day provide a way around that limitation. Kiryas Joel is finishing the first stage of a $60 million water project, one that eventually will connect the village with the Catskill Aqueduct and the abundant resource flowing from an Ulster County reservoir to New York City. Currently straining to supply its growing population with well water, Kiryas Joel will become water-rich once it taps the city's giant water tunnel.

Whether and how it could share water with its neighbors remains to be seen. But the village's water mains extend into its western reaches, ending not far from the South Blooming Grove border.

cmckenna@th-record.com

Read more from the original source:

Hasidic real-estate frenzy in South Blooming Grove since early last year - Times Herald-Record

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